Recent berkeleylibrary_rw items

Building Librarian Power through Contract Bargaining

Sun, 6 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a poster presented by Timothy Vollmer and Kendra K. Levine from UC Berkeley Library at the 2025 American Library Association Annual Conference.

Librarians at the University of California, one of the largest public university systems, recently completed a year-long negotiation process to reach a new labor contract.

The poster presents central bargaining issues, data, and member stories that:

(1) Highlights our negotiation strategies and tactics on key issues, including salary, professional development funding, academic status, flexible work arrangements, and workload. This includes conducting background research, collecting data through librarian surveys and requests for information, developing our table bargaining approach, and more.

(2) Describes our systemwide and campus organizing actions we used to build power amongst the librarian ranks and our allies. This includes 1:1 conversations, information sharing through email...

Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining

Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining: Institute White Paper

Tue, 3 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

UC Berkeley Library secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities to help key stakeholders to learn to better navigate legal issues in text data mining. UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services led a national team from more than a dozen institutions and organizations to teach humanities researchers, librarians, and research staff how to confidently navigate the major legal issues that arise in text data mining research.

Our institute was called Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM), and ran from June 23-26, 2020.

This white paper describes the institute’s origins and goals, project overview and activities, and reflections and possible follow-on actions.

Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”): White Paper

Mon, 2 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining - Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”) is a National Endowment for the Humanities Level 1 Advancement Grant project addressing legal and ethical issues faced by U.S. digital humanities (DH) practitioners whose text data mining (TDM) research and practice intersects with foreign-held or - licensed content, or involves international cooperations.

LLTDM-X is a collaboration between the University of California Berkeley Library and Internet Archive, and builds upon the previous NEH-sponsored institute, Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM). That institute provided guidance and strategies to DH TDM researchers on navigating legal literacies for text data mining (including copyright, contracts, privacy, and ethics) within a U.S. context.

A common challenge highlighted during Building LLTDM was the fact that TDM practitioners...

Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”): Case Study

Mon, 2 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A common challenge highlighted during Building LLTDM was the fact that TDM...

Opinion: CASE Act will Harm Researchers and Freedom of Inquiry

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 (CASE Act) was swept into law during the final days of 2020 as a part of the 5,500 page federal spending bill. In theory, the CASE Act aims to provide a venue for individual creators (such as photographers, graphic artists, musicians) to address smaller copyright infringement claims without spending the time and money required to pursue a copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal court. In reality, however, this additional bureaucratic structure created outside of the traditional court system is fraught with problems that will mostly incentivize large, well-resourced rightsholders or overly litigious copyright owners to take advantage of the system. At the same time, it will confuse and harm innocuous users of content, who may not understand the complexities of copyright law, and who do not know whether or how to respond to a notice of infringement via this small claims process. From our perspective, it will chill...

Archiving e-phemera of Belarus Political Crisis 2020-2021

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It will be almost a year since the Presidential elections in Belarus; they took place last year on August 9, 2020. And the outcome of these elections did not surprise anyone when the Central Elections Commission of Belarus declared that the incumbent President Lukashenko was yet again elected with approximately 80% of votes cast. However, one can see that 20% of the votes cast and counted or counterfeited or undercounted meant there was an underlying level of dissent in the country. The ensuing persistent popular demonstrations that continued although the police actions of OMON (Атрад міліцыі асобага прызначэння) and the use of social media by multiple individuals represented an opportunity to harvest robust and granular archival data related to social protest moment in Belarus. Thus the idea of the web-archiving project took hold at UC Berkeley. At the same time, one can contest the ephemeral nature of digitally born content or even argue the need for documenting and preserving...

Data Sharing, Storage, and the Social Sciences Working Group

Wed, 8 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Data Sharing, Storage, and the Social Sciences Working Group

Archiving e-phemera of Belarus Political Crisis 2020-2021

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Liladhar Pendse presented this paper at the 10th ICCEES World Congress 3–8 August 2021, Concordia University – Montreal.

In the aftermath of the Presidential elections, the UC Berkeley Library's curator for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies created a web archive of Belarus Protests (2020-2021) to document contemporary dissent and protest movements against the autocratic rule of President Lukashenko. This paper provides information about the process management, selection criteria for the websites, and the project outcomes.

UC Berkeley Library Faculty Survey 2018 Report

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

UC Berkeley Library Faculty Survey 2018 Report

Extending Europe in Asia: The Spanish Colonial Imprints of the Philippines (1593-1750)

Mon, 8 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The present work is ongoing research and this presentation was made at the SALALM 2019 Conference in June 2019 in Austin, Texas.

The access to the rare originals of the early Spanish colonial imprints of the Philippines remains problematic. The reference librarians often are restricted to directing the students and scholars to the secondary resources that are available both in print and as a part of the digital assets within the North American academic libraries. This introductory article focuses on the select primary source editions including select Spanish language colonial periodicals that are available electronically on the web along the Open Access.